I did, too. And the “natural fertility sign” that i paid the most attention to was that i got really horny around when i ovulated. Men just looked brighter and shinier. It was really obvious to me, and i still find it weird that it’s not obvious to everyone.
That happened to correlate approximately to some other standard stuff (time since period, mucus, the smell of my urine) but i didn’t track any of those. And my cycle was really irregular. And yes, i got pregnant on my first attempt.
Also, i feel using “the rhythm method” for contraception is a horrible male plot, because it means the woman only gets sex when she’s not into it.
My mom was very regular, and once got pregnant on the day before her period was due.
Her doctor told her she was like a rabbit, and ovulated in response to sex. People are diverse in many ways.
Having almost never been off continuous birth control since the age of 13, I have no good sense of what my natural cycle looks or feels like, except insofar as sometimes my BC stops working and my hormones start taking over. With PMDD it’s two weeks of feeling euphorically happy, energetic and sexy followed by two weeks of feeling suicidal, vengeful and psychotic. Fortunately when I was looking to get pregnant, I didn’t really have enough time to start all that stuff up again before I got pregnant.
But for reasons, I was off birth control for nearly a year after my miscarriage (age 33?) and the weird thing is, I never had a period. I remember asking an OBGYN if that was normal and she said, “No, it’s not.” But nothing ever came of it.
I grew up in a fairly stringently religious household, and yet I have been aware of menstruation since at least the age of five. I know this because it happened in my family’s first apartment bathroom, and we moved from there when I was five years old.
It was treated as a normal human function, and my mom had no hesitation of changing her pads around me. There’s not much privacy in a three room apartment.
Really, I think my introduction to menstruation was one of my least traumatic childhood memories. “0h, so you bleed down there. No big deal.”
My doctor asked me a few questions about perimenopause symptoms, but the main ones were insomnia (since I was a child, I can’t tell if it’s different or equally horrible as ever) and irregular cycles (I’ve had an IUD for a decade - I love my IUD- and don’t really menstruate at all. Occasional spotting isn’t cyclic).
So I have blood tests coming up!
Yay mid-40s!
I’m quite open about things with my son (ew, mom!).
My parents had the odd balance of “open, if they ask” which meant for a shy kid I didn’t ask. I remember sex ed in school (grade 5/6 but some biology stuff as early as grade 3) and “knew” what my period was when it started while not being remotely prepared at all to deal with it.
My father was the one who was home at the time, and he quietly went about getting me supplies and then had my mom call from work to talk. With two daughters, and night shift work, dad was often the one who had to make emergency runs to the pharmacy with his only complaint being EXACTLY WHAT COLOUR PACKAGE DO YOU NEED? For a while there, Always had shapes to differentiate their products and while I don’t remember the shape I wanted, he found “green diamond” (or club or whatever) to be a perfect way for him to buy us menstrual products.
Both of the Ottlets have had problems — mainly ovarian cysts and twisted tubes — which have led me to the conclusion that the creative figure is actually Father Nature. Because Mother Nature would never have come up with a reproductive process that put so much of the burden (and inconvenience) on Her daughters.
Also extremely white menstrual fluid! How would anybody who had only that for education connect that with blood?
Not to mention the total lack of explanation of how fertilization occurs. There isn’t even any indication that another human has to be involved (unless you count the wedding dress at the very end, I suppose,)
— My parents, somewhere around 1960, left a book on my bookshelf. It left out a lot; but it was massively better than that video. And it was apparently more info than the neighbor girls had, because they were very curious about it. When my mother found out I’d shown it to them, she told me I shouldn’t have done that, because their parents might have wanted to explain it themselves. I don’t think it occurred to her that their parents might not do so.
It’s bad for some people. I just had increasingly erratic periods; then they stopped. I had some mild hot flashes, but nothing bad — I remember working outside in cold weather and finding them pleasant.
Yeah. Relying on it as the only method isn’t wise unless all you’re doing is trying to space pregnancies further apart, not to avoid them entirely.
Yeah, I think I had ONE menopause-era experience that made me think “hmm, is this the thing that people call a hot flash?” That was basically it, physically.
I did go a few months needing to keep a conscious tighter rein on my suddenly shorter and hotter temper: more sharp anger spikes for really no good reason, like a child or something. (I remember thinking “wow, is this basically how men feel all the time? shit.” I did not automatically take my word for that, though.)
I realize from talking to a lot of other post-menopausal women that I got VERY lucky. (Apparently some studies suggest that never having been pregnant, as in my case, correlates with milder menopause symptoms? though I have no idea why.)
I think it was pretty good for 1946. Yeah, it says that it’s your fault if you get stressed or catch a cold, and suggested that you shouldn’t dance too enthusiastically when you have your period, and reminds you how important it is to look pretty… And, it struck out on “where do babies come from”, leaving the creepy idea that an egg might just spontaneously be impregnated. But it has a lot of solid information, including critically that “watery fluid and blood” will emerge from your vagina, which is between where you pee and where you poop, for a few days every month, and that this is normal.
The video i saw had characters named “Miss egg” and “Mr sperm”, which adds an important piece to the puzzle, but it was awfully goofy.